VIEW PARK

It is a garden island in an urban sea, a plush community of high-priced homes and meticulously landscaped lawns. In the ‘60s, it was home to well-to-do whites--but then the transformation began. As prosperous black families moved in, the whites moved out. Today, following the wave of ‘white flight,’ it may well be Los Angeles’ wealthiest black neighborhood.

In the early 1960s, the first substantial number of prosperous black families began integrating View Park, one of Los Angeles’ most attractive neighborhoods--2,000 spacious homes hidden in the Baldwin Hills between La Brea Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard.

View Park’s equally well-to-do whites, many of whom had lived in their houses since they were built in the ‘40s and ‘50s, did not take long to react.

They left.

Within eight years, three-quarters of them had sold their homes to black lawyers, physicians, entrepreneurs and entertainers, often at cut-rate prices. By 1970, blacks outnumbered whites nearly 3 to 1. By 1980 the ratio was 9 to 1.

White Flight

It was one of many waves of “white flight” that has hit Los Angeles and the rest of the nation in the last 30 years. Yet as he remembers View Park’s sellers, Deloy Edwards has an incredulous tone in his voice.

“You know what they did?” asked Edwards, a veteran black real estate broker. “They left the best area of Los Angeles. They were crazy.”

What whites left behind reigns today as Los Angeles’ loveliest and arguably wealthiest black neighborhood.

Its eclectic mix of custom-built Spanish, colonial, Tudor and ranch-style homes are meticulously landscaped. Valued from $150,000 to $500,000, they are graced with interiors of 2,500 to 5,000 square feet and backyard views ranging from downtown to the ocean.

The residents range from middle-aged families whose children have moved, to younger, high-salaried professionals, to a handful of celebrities, like rap singer Kurtis Blow, who recently moved into a lavish home near the peak of the hill, bought from basketball star Norm Nixon and entertainer Debbie Allen.

Neighborhood Activism

A network of block clubs battles developers, fighting off plans like low-income apartments and a motel on the fringes of the hill. Neighborhood Watch signs are attached to each street sign, and cooperation with law enforcement is “the best I’ve seen in my 21 years in the Sheriff’s Department,” according to Lt. Jerry Conklin, whose deputies patrol the area from the Marina del Rey sheriff’s station.

Because families tend to live in the neighborhood for decades, there are relatively few houses for sale. Yet prices for those on the market are often $100,000 less than homes with comparable features and aesthetics a few miles west.

The neighborhood’s pleasures are well-concealed. The few people who have heard the name View Park often confuse it with the adjacent black community of Baldwin Hills, which was commonly referred to in news reports as the “Black Beverly Hills” when fire destroyed 48 homes there last summer.

Such descriptions draw a raised eyebrow of disdain from View Park residents.

“Baldwin Hills,” one of them sniffs with good-natured exaggeration, “is an eyesore”--a mere tract of homes, smaller and newer, with tiny or non-existent front yards.

When the county wanted to put a little asphalt and ivy jogging park in View Park in the 1970s, a number of residents argued against adding benches, drinking fountains or restrooms. According to one politician’s account--denied by community leaders--the reason was to discourage “those people” from Baldwin Hills, many of whom have just as much money as those people in View Park, from driving up the hill to use the park.

Snubbed Areas

The flatlands to the east--Crenshaw Boulevard and the rest of Los Angeles beyond--draw more serious snubbing. The boulevard, which borders the black middle-class communities of Crenshaw and Leimert Park, is derided as an unsafe collection of ghetto-goods stores. The faded Crenshaw Shopping Center is avoided at any cost. Even the far newer Fox Hills Mall on the west side of the hills is snubbed as declasse. Shopping means commuting to Westwood or Beverly Hills.

“It’s kind of elitist, but that’s the way people here are,” said Victor Parker, a 31-year-old aerospace company operations manager who, with his wife, bought a home in the middle-slope portion of View Park four years ago and recently followed the familiar pattern of moving uphill, purchasing a two-story, three-bedroom colonial with a pool, maid’s quarters and a backyard view of downtown.

“Most of my neighbors feel blacks were very, very fortunate to get this area,” said Parker, vice president of the View Park Community Council, which represents the unincorporated community. “They feel like we’re going to show people that just because it’s a minority area doesn’t mean it’s shoddy.”

That feeling runs deep among many View Park residents--a blow against centuries of racial stereotypes and the cold fact that 30.9% of all American black families live below the poverty line. Yet there is an ambivalence about expressing this pride; after all, boasting implies surprise that blacks are capable of such a life style.

Common Presumption

To Winston Doby, who grew up in Watts and moved to View Park four years ago, the neighborhood’s most significant role is putting to rest the presumption that a black person has made it only if he moves to a white community.

View Park--along with Baldwin Hills and the well-integrated, upper-middle-class community of Ladera Heights to the southwest--”provides tangible evidence that there are numbers of successful blacks who have chosen to set their roots in a community that remains predominantly black,” said Doby, 46, UCLA’s vice chancellor for student affairs.

Jo Ramsey, a black history teacher-turned-real estate agent, remembers the stigma Doby is talking about.

Before seeing View Park and buying a home there in 1974, she presumed it was “a place where all the blacks were coming in, and it was going to be a ghetto.”

Ramsey paused to let that image float through her luxuriously decorated home on Olympiad Avenue, one of the community’s main streets. Her jaw tightened.

“There’s a thing in this country that has a prejudice against an area that has a lot of black people,” she said, “and do you know it hangs onto us, too?”

Beyond its symbolic power, View Park is a demographic rarity. It is one of the relatively few neighborhoods in the United States that is both solidly black and solidly upper-middle class.

Census Findings

One reason such communities are scarce is that when blacks in higher socioeconomic levels move from the city to the suburbs, they tend to seek out white neighborhoods, according to a 1981 study published by the U.S. Census Bureau,

The study found that two-thirds of blacks with four or more years of college moved into suburban census tracts that were less than 10% black. By contrast, less than one-fifth of these blacks moved to census tracts with black populations of 40% or more.

In addition, in Southern California there are relatively few blacks who can afford a place like View Park.

According to the 1980 Census, the most recent house-by-house count, there were only 8,076 black households in Los Angeles County with incomes of $50,000 or more, accounting for 2.4% of the county’s black households. (By comparison, there were 165,441 white households with similar incomes, accounting for 8.2% of the white population.)

In the census tract that contains most of View Park, the average family income in 1980 was $34,000, about 2 1/2 times the average family income among Los Angeles County’s blacks and several thousand dollars above the countywide average for white families.

However, because that tract includes a small, less affluent section outside View Park and omits several of View Park’s richest streets, View Park’s actual average family income was much higher. Today, the typical family, often relying on two incomes, probably earns between $75,000 and $95,000, Parker estimated.

It is not only money that makes View Park special.

Residential Stability

It is remarkably stable. While only half of both whites and blacks in the county had lived in the same residence for five years or longer, according to the 1980 Census, three-quarters of View Park’s had lived in their homes for 10 years or longer, and half had lived there for at least 15.

In many ways, View Park resembles a chunk of the affluent, predominantly white West San Fernando Valley: Roughly the same percentage of residents work in managerial and professional positions and own their own homes, nearly 40% have four or more years of college, and a quarter of the families have three or more cars.

When the subject of race comes up, View Park residents are normally quick to point out that their neighborhood is only about 80% black, with 10% to 15% whites and the remainder Asian.

Whether that constitutes integration is a matter of semantics. Most of View Park’s whites are white-flight holdouts who decided to stay; few whites are moving in.

Donald DeMarco, vice president of National Neighbors, a nonprofit coalition of 225 organizations working for multiracial neighborhoods, said that in terms of trying to create integrated neighborhoods, a community like View Park is “part of the problem . . . whether it’s integrated or segregated has to do with who’s buying houses.”

Many parents in View Park say they assure their children of a racially mixed experience by sending them to private schools or enrolling them in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Permit With Transportation program, a voluntary integration program that buses minority children to primarily white schools.

Elementary School Avoided

Few are willing to send their children to the neighborhood’s Windsor Hills Elementary School, even though it sits at the top of the hill and has recorded achievement test scores significantly above the school district average.

“People make this choice for different reasons--some for a better education, some for an integrated experience, some for safety,” said one parent, who was able to make an unusual arrangement to enroll his children in a suburban school district far from View Park.

“I wanted my children to be able to communicate--to compete--with students from a variety of circumstances,” he said. “That’s the kind of world they’re going to live in, more so than we.”

The effect of these choices is to create another kind of separation, both for the children--who often have one set of friends at home and another at school--and the adults.

“We tend to pick up the kids from school in Hancock Park or West L.A. and come home and close our doors,” said Winston Braham, 35, director of transportation and administrative services at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who moved to View Park two years ago. “We don’t pay much attention to what is happening on Crenshaw.”

The idea that these hills would become an enclave of black wealth was unimaginable in 1932, when they were chosen as the site of the Olympic Village for that summer’s Olympic Games. To planners of the Games, the empty land was ideal: Not only was it less than four miles from the Coliseum, but its hillside location made it 10 degrees cooler than the city below.

Five miles of streets were wrapped around the hills, servicing 500 trim pink and white cottages. Hundreds of thousands of visitors dropped by, since this was the first time that all Olympic contestants had been housed in one place.

After the games, the cottages were removed and in 1936 the Los Angeles Investment Co. purchased the area from the Clara Baldwin Stocker Estate and began preparing the property for home construction.

Parcel by parcel the land was sold off and during the next two decades individual builders and several development companies spliced together the bulk of the neighborhood’s homes, fashioning red Spanish tile next to Cape Cod gray next to spiraling Mediterranean turrets next to imposing white colonial pillars. Unlike contemporary hillside communities, plenty of room was left for front and back yards. Individual rooms were spacious and maid’s quarters were routinely installed.

During the Olympics, a white UCLA student named John Murphy, who had been raised in Leimert Park, had taken a walk to see the Olympic village and fantasized about living on this gorgeous plateau.

Eighteen years later, after Murphy had married and become a successful orthodontist, his wife, Mabel, took him to see a house she had fallen in love with. There it was, in the same hills, on a half-acre of land on Olympiad Avenue, one of two streets in View Park that had retained their names from the old village.

The Murphys moved in, along with hundreds of other doctors and dentists who had invested in Crenshaw medical buildings within walking distance. There were so many physicians that View Park was nicknamed “Pill Hill.”

It was a placid, idyllic place. There was enough undeveloped land to still find opossums and rabbits. The Murphys raised three sons and filled one scrapbook after another with photos of family gatherings.

Black Numbers Grow

A handful of blacks had moved in by 1960, according to census statistics. But in 1962, at a time when the nation’s consciousness of racism was being wrenched into shape by sit-ins, marches and fire hoses, the numbers began to grow.

“It never bothered us at all,” said John Murphy, who has continued to enjoy his home for 36 years. “I’ve crossed all lines all my life, so there were no (negative) feelings.”

All around the Murphys, however, there were.

Neighbors began selling. Some were forthcoming about their reasons. Others chose not to specify. Still others, their children grown, rationalized that houses so large were no longer needed.

“It seemed like overnight,” Mabel Murphy said.

Following the pattern of the Crenshaw District, View Park quickly reached what sociologists would come to call the “tipping point”--the level of integration at which whites no longer feel “comfortable” and wholesale flight begins.

Various researchers estimate the tipping point at between 25% and 40% minority population. According to the best recollections of residents, View Park passed that mark even before the Watts riots of 1965. The fact that the riot curfew zone extended as close as Crenshaw Boulevard merely cemented the white exodus.

Money to Be Made

There were hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate commissions to be made. Deloy Edwards, whose real estate company was based in Crenshaw, sent a postcard of his firm’s black sales staff to every homeowner in View Park. On the back was the pleasant, routine invitation to call when and if it came time to sell.

In encouraging whites to move, that sort of technique was as effective as “calling and saying, ‘Hey, the dark cloud is on the horizon,’ ” said James Johnson, a UCLA professor of geography who has researched black population patterns.

To Edwards--who told of his mailing strategy in an interview after denying a persistent neighborhood recollection that he went door-to-door encouraging whites to sell--it was simply a way of making money.

“More money than I ever made in real estate,” he said. Whites “more or less gave their property away,” sometimes for half price. “They thought a black living next door would make their property values go down.”

Alarmed at the prospect of a wholesale racial transformation, proponents of integration formed Crenshaw Neighbors and attempted to calm white residents.

“They’d do a lot of visiting so you’d know I could speak English and wasn’t a jungle bunny chewing on a rib,” recalled an elegant, middle-aged black woman who moved to View Park in early 1964. “But black people take these things philosophically. We knew it wasn’t going to work. They’ll smile a lot, but they’ll wind up running. I’m sad they ran.”

Room for Large Family

In 1967, Martha Fitzgerald, a white who smiles often and with unquestionable sincerity, needed a home for her husband and their 11 children. The Fitzgeralds, who had prided themselves on living in integrated neighborhoods, found a seven-bedroom home for $65,000 on Fairway Boulevard near the base of the hill.

“Our oldest child was 16 when we moved,” she said, “and our friends would say, ‘Ohhhh, she’ll marry a black.’ Our friends still don’t believe we’ve done this.”

Fitzgerald said she quickly felt welcomed and accepted by her black neighbors. Still, there were challenges. A younger daughter, having been shunned by blacks on her first day at a new school, told her mother that the classmates simply “didn’t know that I was black”--in other words, that she “understood,” her mother explained.

A decade later, in a more contentious, less idealistic era, the Fitzgerald children would be temporarily bused along with their black classmates to white schools in West Los Angeles under the Los Angeles School District’s mandatory integration program.

A different kind of racial irony faced the children of Elaine and Floyd Grant.

By the time the Grants moved into View Park in 1971, a couple of blocks away from John and Mabel Murphy on Olympiad, 4,000 of the neighborhood’s 5,795 whites had moved. Hundreds more would continue to depart each year.

The Grants had lived in a largely white community in Upstate New York, and in their first year after moving to Los Angeles they were the only blacks in Westchester, a suburb near Los Angeles International Airport.

Benefits of Integration

Elaine Grant, now a bank vice president, said she became concerned that her children were “starting to lose their identity” as blacks. (“My daughter would come out of the pool, shake her hair and wonder why it didn’t dry like the other kids’.”) She hoped that in View Park they would reap the social benefits of integration.

But as more white families moved away and almost no new ones moved in, there were few white children to associate with. The new neighborhood was in danger of becoming as one-dimensional as the old one.

“Children here don’t get a chance to interface with other kinds of children,” Grant said. “That’s sad.”

In 1974, exactly a block away from both the Grants and the Murphys, Jo and Wade Ramsey found a two-story home whose modest exterior hid 4,000 square feet of space.

Gradually, Jo Ramsey began to take up real estate, and it began to irritate her that the lavish homes in her neighborhood sold for so much less than similarly isolated hillside homes in white ones.

According to urban affairs experts and sociologists who have studied housing patterns, such price differentials are common and evolve in a typical manner: Most home seekers use real estate agents of the same race, and white agents are reluctant to show primarily black areas to white buyers for fear of “insulting” them or losing credibility. This steering, the theory goes, lessens the demand for homes in black areas and keeps prices relatively low.

Denied Opportunity

Another consequence, these experts say, is that younger white home buyers who might be willing to live in a primarily black neighborhood if housing selection and prices were economically favorable rarely get the opportunity to consider such a choice.

Bob Bortfield, owner of City Living Realty, which has attracted some white buyers interested in restoring homes in the primarily black West Adams area near downtown, called this “the high price of prejudice.”

“How can you sell somebody condos in Culver City--little made-over apartments--for $150,000? By scaring people away from places like View Park,” Bortfield said. “You tell them it’s dangerous. (According to Sheriff’s Lt. Conklin, the crime rate in View Park is moderate to low, and far less than Marina del Rey’s.) You tell them that homes in black areas will never increase in value. You tell them they’ll lose their money.

“It’s not only white brokers,” Bortfield continued. “Black brokers do the same thing. People don’t want to upset the apple cart.”

Having wrung her hands over such buying patterns, Jo Ramsey explodes.

“How we’re brainwashed!” she said. Whites “will pay $250,000 for a 1,200-square-foot house in Westchester, even though here a 3,089-square-foot home with three bedrooms, a family room, maid quarters and a view of the world was appraised at $325,000. It’s strictly race.”

Significantly, when a young white couple named Mark and Cathy Hill found out about View Park several years ago, they did it without a real estate agent. Mark Hill stumbled onto it.

Jogging Through Area

The Hills, who had moved to Los Angeles from Texas in 1978, needed a house close to USC with space for their piano. They found it in a neighborhood called View Heights, which borders Inglewood. Hill, a jogger, soon found himself running north through Windsor Hills, a primarily black neighborhood on the south edge of View Park with a similar architectural mix of smaller homes. He and his wife, who love old homes, were drawn to both neighborhoods.

“I haven’t met a white person yet who’s of our generation who ever heard about this place,” Mark Hill said.

The Hills, both 33, a two-income couple with a young daughter and another child soon to be born, moved into Windsor Hills in 1984 and are now trying to climb the ladder into View Park. While they say they would enjoy “not being the token whites,” the fact that they can afford a large, well-built home in View Park makes the neighborhood an easy choice, they said.

Besides, Mark Hill added, socioeconomic homogeneity tends to blur racial lines.

“I’m an executive recruiter and the guy next door (who is black) is a mortgage broker,” he said. “He has two Mercedes and I want two.”